Marketing Land » Chris Hextonhttp://marketingland.com
Marketing LandTue, 31 Mar 2015 19:41:50 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.9.35 Ways To Kick Start Your Email Marketing This Yearhttp://marketingland.com/5-ways-to-kickstart-your-email-marketing-this-year-70238
http://marketingland.com/5-ways-to-kickstart-your-email-marketing-this-year-70238#commentsWed, 22 Jan 2014 14:20:53 +0000http://marketingland.com/?p=70238The new year is upon us — and there is no better time than the start of the year to review your email marketing campaigns and make improvements. Here are five things you must review early this year to set your campaigns on the path to success! 1. Learn How To Maximise Your Subject Line If […]

]]>The new year is upon us — and there is no better time than the start of the year to review your email marketing campaigns and make improvements. Here are five things you must review early this year to set your campaigns on the path to success!

1. Learn How To Maximise Your Subject Line

If you open most modern email marketing clients (on the web or your mobile phone), you’ll see something like this:

What we’re looking at here are the three components of the “modern” subject line:

The From name (e.g., “ImpulseFlyer”)

The actual Subject line (e.g., “Last Few Days…“)

The message Preview snippet (e.g., “Here’s a brief summary of the…“)

Learning to maximise the impact of each component will help you increase your open, click and conversion rates.

Take, for example, the common practice of using the name of your business in the Subject line. Lots of businesses use a subject line format like “[Company Name] Subject line goes here.” However, you can avoid wasting precious space by putting your company name somewhere in the From field, rather than the subject line. Here’s an example from Vero:

(Click for larger image.)

Another important tip is to move the “View in browser” link from the top of your email template further down in the body.

Why? The first line of text is what appears in the Preview snippet! Don’t waste this space, as it presents a valuable opportunity to get in front of your audience before they even open your campaign. Make the Preview area count by placing informative, engaging content right at the top of your email. Here’s a great example from EasyJet:

(Click for larger image.)

2. Use Creative Personalisation To Boost Conversions

Email personalisation is not dead, but it sure can be boring! The basics — like including someone’s name in the salutation — just aren’t enough to make you stand out from the crowd any more.

Earlier this year, Tzvi from Cartology blogged about a successful tactic to personalise coupon codes that led to a 35% increase in revenue over his client’s standard returns. Imagine 35% more revenue thanks to a little bit of personalisation!

I’d be smiling.

By sending each user a custom coupon named after the business they worked for (e.g. COKE for customers whose domains were “coke.com”), they generated a vitality that was not seen in their normal campaigns:

Another great example of personalisation, of the more advanced kind, comes from YouTube:

By including a video the recipient actually watched, YouTube displays a nice example of creative personalisation to encourage recipient engagement.

How can you use the customer data in your database to find an angle for segmentation that brings context to your campaigns? It’ll very likely improve your conversion rates!

3. Track Conversions Accurately

Tracking conversions in this day and age is no mean feat.

The concept of attribution is a rabbit hole: a customer might discover your site via PPC, interact with three of your newsletters, read four blog posts, click on a remarketing ad and email your support before signing up.

Figuring out which channel is responsible for a specific goal can sometimes be a matter of perspective. What you should be doing is looking at all channels that contributed to each and every goal in order to ensure you don’t discount the impact that your email marketing has on your overall success.

As an example, Mike Pantoliano shared a story from one of his clients over on the SEOMoz blog. They had inadvertently been undervaluing their resource center as an effective marketing channel:

If you set up Google Analytics across your domain and ensure you use UTM tags on all incoming links from your email marketing campaigns (which many providers do automatically), you will be able to ensure you get your hands on the maximum amount of data to optimise your email marketing campaigns for revenue, not just opens or clicks.

4. Increase Your Subscribe Rates With A Survey

In 2013, Vero spent a lot of time trying to increase their audience, particularly by increasing subscription rates on their blog posts and homepage.

One of the most effective discoveries utilised Qualaroo’s “nudge” feature.

By asking customers a simple multiple choice or yes/no question, you are able to get some engagement. From this point, you can follow up with a second question or direct those that responded positively (or with a particular answer) to a subscribe form:

This gives you a new channel with which to capture customers’ email addresses.

Better yet, Qualaroo surveys are relatively unobtrusive and can be placed anywhere on your site. They can be used on your home page, your blog’s main page, or targeted at specific posts (with different questions per post). They’re the perfect way to get more subscribers anywhere you feel you have a relevant question to ask and an audience that will be interested in what you send them!

Click through rates on newsletters vs. transactional emails based on the data from over 8,000 campaigns.

…but also give you a whole new host of opportunities to email your customers.

Trigger-based campaigns are great: they run automatically, they lift conversions permanently, and they get sent to every customer that takes a particular action on your site at just the right time. They have context.

One great recent example to round out 2013 came from Etihad:

By emailing economy passengers a month or so before they left for their flight, Etihad used personalised data and customer actions to send an extremely effective email campaign.

Another great example comes from Groove who take the opportunity to email customers that abandoned their free trial and attempt to get them to upgrade:

By automating these sorts of campaigns, you too can maximise your chances of success and reduce the room for error, forgetfulness and other issues which can stymie the success of manual campaigns.

Over To You

What do you have planned in 2014 to ensure your campaigns are up-to-date and converting as high as possible?

]]>http://marketingland.com/5-ways-to-kickstart-your-email-marketing-this-year-70238/feed0The Most Overlooked Email Marketing Strategy: Segmentationhttp://marketingland.com/the-most-overlooked-email-marketing-strategy-segmentation-63729
http://marketingland.com/the-most-overlooked-email-marketing-strategy-segmentation-63729#commentsWed, 06 Nov 2013 14:35:31 +0000http://marketingland.com/?p=63729I get questions all the time from marketers looking for advice on their email campaigns. How can we run better campaigns? How can we improve opens and clicks? Should we use HTML templates or plain text? How often should we email? …and so on. Time and again, I’ve noticed that email marketers rarely focus on […]

]]>I get questions all the time from marketers looking for advice on their email campaigns. How can we run better campaigns? How can we improve opens and clicks? Should we use HTML templates or plain text? How often should we email?

…and so on.

Time and again, I’ve noticed that email marketers rarely focus on the one thing that always helps to increase conversions: segmentation.

Here is a question: Do you like personal attention?

So do your recipients!

Segmenting your emails means sending each individual customer the right email for them at this moment.

Fortunately, segmentation isn’t hard to achieve. Here are three approaches you can take to better segment your list, from the simple to the more complex.

1. Start Small & Segment On A Single Key Variable

If you don’t do any segmentation right now, then the place to begin is by picking the most relevant attribute for your online business and using this to split your emails into two.

Let’s take a simple example from online clothing retailer ASOS. Their key attribute is whether a customer is male or female. To see just how frictionless it can be to collect this information, here is how ASOS collect this information:

It’s more than likely that you already have some information you can use to segment your customer database. Think about their location, their age, whether they have opened any emails in the last four weeks, whether they have visited your site more than three times, etc. All of these pieces of data could be used to segment effectively.

The segmentation on this list is simply by country, which can be gleaned from subscriber IP addresses, phone numbers or just by asking.

To do: What is a key attribute you can use to segment your customer base?

2. Start With Your Goal & Work Backward To Develop A Strategy

The 2012 Obama re-election campaign has been talked about time and again, thanks to its creative and effective use of technological channels such as email.

One thing the campaigners did particularly well was segment their database. Their goal was, of course, fund raising.

Starting with your end-game in mind is always a logical way to develop your marketing campaigns. In the following example, the Obama camp reviewed the data they had on hand and worked backward to develop a segmentation strategy.

They selected a cohort of customers for whom they already had payment details (from the previous 2008 campaign). This was a segment they knew they could likely count on for a donation.

They used this knowledge to put together a highly targeted and very pragmatic campaign:

This isn’t the sort of campaign that could be sent to all customers, as the direct links simply wouldn’t work. Thanks to segmentation like this, the Obama campaign raised $500 million using email marketing.

A similar example comes from Amazon. If you buy a book on your Kindle, they send you an email to ask for a review. Thinking about their goal, they break down the call-to-action just like the Obama campaigners did:

Again, this email only works because of its highly targeted nature. Rather than a blanket send, they segment their database by people who have recently purchased certain books.

To do: Review your newsletter or automated campaign strategy and think about your goals. How can you work back from that goal and create a more targeted email with calls-to-action that are extremely direct?

3. “Segment” On A One-To-One Basis

The Amazon example above leads nicely into the concept of true one-to-one segmentation, or personalisation. This is the ultimate end-game, and it requires some creativity.

DoggyLoot is an online retailer that sells (you guessed it) products for your dog! They understand well that their target customers love their dogs — they have a personal relationship with them. They developed a portal that captures specific information about their customers’ beloved pets:

Using this information, they’re able to send one-to-one emails that employ segmentation to talk directly to each recipient about their dog. Take this example promotion featuring products for “big dogs.” This email features entirely different products to the emails they’d send customers with small dogs:

Another great example of one-to-one segmentation comes from Tzvi at Userlicious.

Here’s what Tzvi did:

Exported a list of all customers in the email database and broke them down by customers that use Gmail, Yahoo and other popular email service providers. He did this by looking at the domain of each user, e.g., [user@gmail.com] vs. [user@walmart.com].

Excluding customers using these popular web-based providers, he used the remaining domains and set up an individual coupon for each domain, e.g., “WALMART” for customers with the domain “@walmart.com.”

He sent out a newsletter with copy along the lines of “Hey you! Here’s a special coupon just for you…” featuring a coupon with each individual company’s name!

Here’s a mockup of how the campaign looked:

Thanks to conversion tracking via the coupon, they were able to do a post-campaign analysis and determine that they made an extra 35% revenue over their usual newsletter statistics. By comparing sales with the coupon to emails from the coupon, they were able to see that this 35% came from recipients sharing the email with their colleagues at work.

Now that is the power of segmentation.

To do: What information can you collect from your customers that you can insert into your email campaigns to segment them on a truly one-to-one basis? Think about what makes your customers happy. Both of the examples above put a smile on the recipients’ faces, as they are genuinely helpful.

Over To You

You’ve now got three strategies you can use to develop relevant segments for your next email campaign.

]]>http://marketingland.com/the-most-overlooked-email-marketing-strategy-segmentation-63729/feed0How To Collect Email Subscribers With Landing Pages That Convert At 50%http://marketingland.com/collect-email-subscribers-with-landing-pages-that-convert-at-50-60824
http://marketingland.com/collect-email-subscribers-with-landing-pages-that-convert-at-50-60824#commentsWed, 09 Oct 2013 13:00:56 +0000http://marketingland.com/?p=60824Using a dedicated landing page for an email marketing list can lift conversion rates up to 50%. That’s an impressive figure! Better yet, a landing page per list, or per campaign, gives you the power to maximize the effectiveness of each individual funnel. This means you can play with all of the elements from the […]

]]>Using a dedicated landing page for an email marketing list can lift conversion rates up to 50%.

That’s an impressive figure!

Better yet, a landing page per list, or per campaign, gives you the power to maximize the effectiveness of each individual funnel. This means you can play with all of the elements from the moment the customer hits your landing page to the moment they receive and react to your emails.

Perhaps best of all, dedicated email landing pages allow you to use all of the great conversion optimization techniques that usually apply to your landing pages, so you can use the same tactics in relation to email marketing.

This post shares examples and provides guidance on how you can use dedicated landing pages to increase your subscriber conversions rates.

The Rise Of The Dedicated Email Marketing Landing Page

Over the last 12 months, there seems to have been a big lift in the number of online businesses using dedicated landing pages to drive an increased number of leads into their email marketing funnels.

Take this example from Unbounce for its dedicated educational course on better landing pages:

Another example comes from AWeber, which used this dedicated landing page to collect subscribers for its blog newsletter:

Net-a-Porter also used a dedicated landing page to collect leads for its marketing newsletter:

If you have a B2B software company then this example from HubSpot is one of the purest you’ll find. HubSpot has hundreds of landing pages driving lead generation for a whole series of email marketing campaigns:

Each of the above examples employs a number of tricks that you must use if you are setting up a landing page dedicated to collecting leads for your email marketing.

The three tips below will help you nail this strategy the first time around.

1. Have A Clear Call-To-Action

All of the examples above make it very clear how to subscribe. This sounds super obvious but having a really crisp, clear call-to-action is a must, no matter what you are selling on your landing page.

Having a big, colorful button is a no-brainer and a standard landing page optimisation strategy, so make sure you do it, too!

For another example, WPEngine makes very clear on its dedicated educational email course landing page how you should subscribe and what benefits you get:

It’s short, sweet and to the point. Ignore at your peril.

2. Use Copy To Sell Your List

A key benefit of using a landing page over a simple subscribe form in your footer or sidebar is that you can really sell your email marketing campaigns.

Write copy that addresses the key why of your marketing list and answers customers’ key questions or doubts about why they should subscribe.

You don’t have to make it long, the AWeber example above does a great job with seven clear points and great copy as to why you should subscribe to its blog newsletter.

3. Use Social Proof

People hate missing out!

Social proof shows visitors that they need to subscribe; otherwise, they’ll miss out on what the crowd is getting!

The most common forms of social proof are social media “likes” (Twitter and Facebook) or a subscriber count (e.g., “Join 10,000 other subscribers on our email marketing list”). Buffer uses social proof any time it mentions their blog newsletter:

Note: These three tips are just the basics. Each new landing page (or series of pages) you create is, in essence, a new funnel.

Once you do some initial testing and determine that a funnel is going to be successful you should A/B test those pages until they are as effective as they can be. There are a ton of guides out there on optimizing landing pages, and a landing page for email marketing is no different.

Getting Traffic To Your Pages

One of the biggest questions you will undoubtedly ask when considering email marketing landing pages is, “How do I get traffic to my new landing page?”

There are a bunch of ways and some of the most effective include:

Advertising Your Landing Page Within Your Own Properties

Unbounce does a great job of this on its blog. Using a display-style ad in the sidebar they drive traffic to their educational email course. This means they can easily track the source and the effectiveness of the landing page.

Neil Patel’s QuickSprout employs a HelloBar to drive users to his own lead generation page:

Both of these tactics are great as they help you drive otherwise “dead” traffic (traffic that may not convert to your primary call-to-action) into potential subscribers that you can then educate, earn their trust and convert into customers!

Using Display Remarketing

Display remarketing is relatively cheap. Using AdRoll, Perfect Audience or other remarketing software makes it easy to retarget blog or site visitors on Google and Facebook. Using ads, you can drive traffic to one of your dedicated landing pages without spending a lot of money.

Here’s an example of an ad used by Vero for its educational email marketing course:

Remarketing is also powerful, as you can create useful, targeted segments to advertise to. For example, you could send blog readers that don’t subscribe to your blog to the subscription page, whilst you could send subscribers that aren’t on your educational email course to your educational email course landing page.

Mention It Everywhere!

A dedicated landing page is just that: dedicated!

Any time you do a webinar, share a slideshow, use social media, or even just send emails with a signature, you can easily drive customers to one of your dedicated landing pages (preferably the most targeted one) and get extra subscribers without additional effort.

Having the right landing page for the right content will also dramatically increase your conversions. If you have a slideshow on sending targeted email marketing, and then follow up with a link to a landing page that sells an educational email course on the same content, it’ll work very well!

Conclusion

This guide will give you the knowledge you need to set up at least one dedicated landing page for an email marketing list.

]]>http://marketingland.com/collect-email-subscribers-with-landing-pages-that-convert-at-50-60824/feed0Three Tricks One Site Used To Increase Subscribers 150% In A Monthhttp://marketingland.com/three-tricks-one-site-used-to-increase-subscribers-150-in-one-month-58420
http://marketingland.com/three-tricks-one-site-used-to-increase-subscribers-150-in-one-month-58420#commentsWed, 11 Sep 2013 15:49:35 +0000http://marketingland.com/?p=58420If you are aiming to use email marketing effectively, then one of your primary focuses should always be to increase your subscribers. There are a myriad of ways to optimise your site for email subscription, but practical advice can be hard to come by. Here are 3 practical approaches you can use for inspiration to […]

Using behavior data to adjust what your customers see is a sure-fire way to increase your conversion rate.

There are a lot of places you can use behavior data to improve conversion rates. A good place to start is your call-to-action. In the example below, Vero adjusted the calls-to-action on their email marketing blog to reflect the content of individual posts, rather than using something generic.

By referencing the content that the customer has just read, Vero has increased its subscribe rate virtually overnight.

This is a great place to start as it’s not fancy to implement. Simply specify specific calls-to-action based on the individual post content; this can be done with a number of plug-ins on most popular blogging platforms and could easily be appropriated to online stores and other settings.

If you’re looking for other easy optimisations, treating first-time customers a little differently is a great way to emphasise the reasons your customers should subscribe.

First-time customers to Vero see a specific call-to-action in the sidebar that guides them to a dedicated landing page (we’ll talk more about those below). This specific call-to-action takes gives Vero a chance to really sell its email marketing list and the reasons for subscribing.

First-time users are a distinct group of customers, and in many instances, you can be a little more forward in asking these visitors to subscribe. By targeting first-time visitors alone, you are able to ensure that regular readers don’t see distracting elements that they might have seen before.

Another great way to use customers’ behavior to drive action is to ask them questions. You might be surprised to learn that tools like Qualaroo are genuinely effective and allow you to collect a surprising amount of customer feedback.

Vero uses a simple survey to learn more about the visitor at hand. Using multiple choice questions makes it easy for customers to answer and gives Vero the power to re-direct customers based on their answers.

One particularly valuable tip when using surveys to increase your subscribe rate is to direct customers that identify as first-time readers to a subscribe form. Qualaroo has this functionality built in as part of their “Nudge” feature set.

What can you ask your customers to learn more about them and convert them to regular readers?

2. Re-Purpose Valuable Content As Free Offers

If you do any form of content marketing, you will have a cache of valuable content you’ve used in the past. Thanks to Google Analytics and other analytics providers, it is relatively easy to understand which content is performing well.

Once you know which eBooks, blog posts, slideshows, webinars or other content is your best, you should use this to your advantage and re-purpose this content into something you can offer your customers in return for their joining your email marketing list.

Vero implemented some content gates that require users to subscribe in order to read its best case studies.

This tactic alone increased subscribers by 30% over four weeks.

Once you’ve pulled together pages on your site to offer your best content in exchange for your readers’ email addresses, you should consider “advertising” these pieces of content within your own site structure.

Vero has implemented display ad-style images that direct readers to the most effective content:

This technique gives you the power to maximise the effectiveness of your featured content.

3. Use A Dedicated Landing Page

When it comes to collecting emails, dedicated landing pages are extremely powerful.

Dedicated landing pages will regularly convert at a rate of 35-50%, as they give you a chance to sell the reasons your readers or customers should subscribe to receive emails from you.

These landing pages don’t have to be sexy. Take the example from Vero below:

AWeber has experimented heavily with its blog’s dedicated landing page and have found it a major driver of its content marketing strategy.

Similarly, Patrick McKenzie, an online small business owner, documents the effectiveness of dedicated landing pages for collecting email addresses as part of his course on lifecycle email marketing. In particular, he points out the success of WPEngine’s educational email course collection page.

The tricks to an effective dedicated landing page are:

Keep it simple. Focus on answering your customers’ questions and providing them with genuine reasons to subscribe to your newsletter. No one wants to subscribe for more emails they won’t read. Sell it!

Use a clean and clear subscribe form that your customers are drawn to. As with all calls-to-action, use big buttons and clear copy, and avoid static, unactionable text like “Submit” on your forms.

Treat it like the home page of your website. Run split tests over this page and track every conversion so you can get your numbers as high as possible (it’s not unreasonable to aim for over 40%).

Over To You

So there you have it — a few practical things you can implement on your website to increase your conversions virtually overnight.

The most important step before implementing any of these ideas is to ensure you are tracking your conversions when it comes to subscriptions. Understand your benchmark so that you know how far you’ve come.

Momentum is what you’re after: get some runs on the board and keep implementing little tricks until you too have increased your subscribe rate by over 100%.

What other tips have you tried to increase your conversions? Let us know in the comments!

]]>http://marketingland.com/three-tricks-one-site-used-to-increase-subscribers-150-in-one-month-58420/feed07 Issues That Will Kill Your Email Conversionshttp://marketingland.com/7-issues-that-will-kill-your-email-conversions-54950
http://marketingland.com/7-issues-that-will-kill-your-email-conversions-54950#commentsThu, 15 Aug 2013 13:00:53 +0000http://marketingland.com/?p=54950Many posts list ways to increase the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns… but what about the things you shouldn’t do? Here’s a list of seven things that will actively decrease the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns. You can improve your emails conversions by avoiding these issues! 1. Incorrectly Tracking Conversions When it comes to […]

]]>Many posts list ways to increase the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns… but what about the things you shouldn’t do?

Here’s a list of seven things that will actively decrease the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns. You can improve your emails conversions by avoiding these issues!

1. Incorrectly Tracking Conversions

When it comes to online marketing optimisation, it’s important not to focus on too many metrics at once.

Opens, clicks and subscribes tell you a lot about the various aspects of your campaign and can help you determine whether you should work on your subject lines, your calls-to-action, or something else. But ultimately, you should make sure you’re tracking conversions.

Take this example from Movies Unlimited. By including a coupon in the second email, they increased click-throughs; but, more importantly, they increased paid conversions by 36%.

If you’re not tracking the conversions from your emails, you can do so for free with Google Analytics. By setting up goals in Google Analytics, you can set up an environment to correctly track who does what from which campaign.

After you’ve installed Google Analytics and set up your goals, there are two steps you should take:

Ensure you’re including UTM codes on links back to your website in your campaigns. In tools like Campaign Monitor or Vero, this is easy to do with the check of a box:

Once you’re tracking the source of leads using UTM tags, you will want to group your conversion metrics in Google Analytics. There are lots of ways to do this, but one method that allows you to see which users convert from your email campaigns properly (both directly and indirectly) is outlined in this post on email conversion tracking. Here’s a sneak peek at the end result:

2. Emailing Once Where A Series Is Acceptable

Emailing in a series is far more powerful than you think.

Most companies don’t embrace the power of multiple emails for fear of over-emailing. Whilst a legitimate concern, you should focus on building trust with your customers by sending relevant emails with educational content over time.

If a customer signs up to your product and you send only a single welcome email, you’re missing out on an opportunity to convert your customers.

If you send cart abandonment emails, but you only send one, you’re missing out on lost sales.

There are lots of reasons a customer may miss various emails in your series:

They’re on their way to work and would rather play Candy Crush Saga

They’re trying to get through 30 other emails from their colleagues and clients

They’re rushing to an appointment or dinner

…and so on. This doesn’t mean they don’t want to read what you have to say — sometimes it’s just hard to find the time. Sending a series of even three emails spaced out over the period of a week or two (perhaps at different times of the day) can increase the chances that your customers will interact with your email campaign and, ultimately, convert.

Moreover, when customers do begin to read your series, they are more likely to become engaged.

Check out these statistics from Kareem at SocialWOD over the life of one of his series campaigns:

That’s proof that an email series can help build trust and increase click and conversion rates over a given period.

4. Lacking Focus In Your Ask

Help Scout wrote about their success in reducing the number of calls-to-action in their blog update email:

By having a sole call-to-action (CTA), they increased click-throughs by 17% — that’s a no-brainer!

Not only should you have a single call to action, you should draft attention to it. Here are a few pro tips for increasing the success of your CTA:

Use A Button

Spice up your call-to-action with a big, green button. Take this example from Geckoboard:

If you’re worried about using images in your email (check out point six below), then you should use this little snippet of HTML to build a button that doesn’t require an image.

Repeat the CTA

Repeat your call-to-action multiple times if you can. One way to do this is to include a signature or a “P.S.” (postscript). This usually gives you a great opportunity to re-state your primary ask and to engage “personally” with the reader.

Take this example from Lars at KISSmetrics. This is a great use of the postscript to re-iterate the primary CTA:

5. Never Conducting An A/B Test

When’s the last time you A/B tested one of your email campaigns?

Dan Norris at WPCurve uses A/B testing to determine the best title for all of his blog posts.

This recent success shows that he was able to increase click-throughs on this particular campaign by 28% with a simple A/B test on his subject line.

A/B tests can get much more complex than this, but starting simple is the way to go.

Some A/B tests you can run that will lead to increases in your conversion rates:

HTML vs. plain text emails

Subject lines on blog updates and other newsletters

Testing your call to action copy

Test the look of your CTA (big, green buttons work well!)

Test the ‘From’ address on your campaigns

Test a responsive template

A/B tests are easy to run and, as long as you ensure you channel enough volume through each variation, you can get some really compelling results.

6. Expecting Customers To Have Images Enabled

Up to 52% of customers have images disabled in email by default. That’s a massive percentage of your recipients that may not be able to see your images at all.

This is particularly true with increasing open rates on mobile devices. This means you should start to test your email messages across devices and configurations. Just because a customer has images disabled doesn’t mean that you can’t get good results.

Three approaches to improving conversions in this area are:

Use Plain Text Emails

This isn’t always an option as many campaigns (newsletters, deals, offers) call for images for a good reason. It might be hard to imagine a deal on a particular dress or shirt without an image of it, for example!

If you can get away with it, there is a big case for using plain text or simple rich text emails: they look good on all devices and can still have a prominent call-to-action by ensuring any links are a bright blue colour.

Employ Savvy Design

This example from 500px sets the benchmark in terms of clever design to deal with disabled images:

Top: Email with the images disabled.Bottom: Email with the images enabled.

How can you alter your HTML campaigns to ensure they are effective even when images are disabled?

Use Mozify To Make Your Images More Effective

Email On Acid’s Mozify makes images look good even when images are blocked. Using some crazy styling, they do some pretty awesome work.

Take this example from their own website:

Consider which of the above options might work for you (or test all three) and improve your click-throughs and conversions in all scenarios.

7. Not Using Dedicated Landing Pages

If you are building up a subscriber list, one of the best things you can do is to use dedicated landing pages. At Vero, we use this dedicated landing page to collect subscribers for our email marketing course:

This landing page has a conversion rate of nearly 40% — much higher than the average subscription rate on a popup or sidebar. Driving traffic to a dedicated landing page isn’t as hard as it sounds. The signature of marketing emails, ads on blog or content sites, mentions in presentations and other places can all give you a nice stream of traffic you can convert at high rates.

A great example of a dedicated subscription page comes from the Obama campaign last year:

Specifically speaking to Redditors, you can see how this campaign is more successful than a run-of-the-mill subscription page or box!

On the other side of the equation, dedicated and customised landing pages that specifically relate to your call-to-action will help you increase your conversions.

A high-profile example of what not to do also comes from the Obama campaign in 2012. One of the email campaigns used by the Obama camp led customers to engage with “soft” copy that ultimately led to a “hard” donation page.

Customers respect clarity when it comes to the ask. Make sure your offer or call-to-action matches the page you ultimately send your customers to. Amazon provides a really specific example of this in action. When rating a book, rather than send you to the standard book page with the standard review features, they send you to a sub-page that makes it easy to rate the book directly:

This is very savvy as a conversion technique.

What other mistakes have you made when it comes to email marketing? What ideas have worked?

]]>http://marketingland.com/7-issues-that-will-kill-your-email-conversions-54950/feed15 Email A/B Split Test Ideas You Haven’t Triedhttp://marketingland.com/5-email-ab-split-test-ideas-you-havent-tried-49683
http://marketingland.com/5-email-ab-split-test-ideas-you-havent-tried-49683#commentsWed, 17 Jul 2013 13:00:36 +0000http://marketingland.com/?p=49683You’re probably sitting there thinking, “A/B testing my emails is hard!” or “Where do I even start with A/B testing my email campaigns?” The truth is, most online businesses could spend a lot more time testing their email marketing campaigns, and this means you can stand out from the crowd by being one of the […]

]]>You’re probably sitting there thinking, “A/B testing my emails is hard!” or “Where do I even start with A/B testing my email campaigns?”

The truth is, most online businesses could spend a lot more time testing their email marketing campaigns, and this means you can stand out from the crowd by being one of the companies that does.

If you’re looking for ideas on what to test, here are five things you can experiment with — they’re likely things you have never tried.

Let’s break each idea down and throw in a few examples so you can learn to harness the full power of A/B testing for your email marketing campaigns.

1. Split Your Primary CTA Into Deeper Links

It’s always a good idea to focus on a single call-to-action, as this will generally increase your email marketing conversions. However, there are times when you can drive click-throughs and conversions even higher by splitting your primary call-to-action into parts.

Take this example from Indeed.com:

As a reader, I find this email very engaging — it not only reduces the number of clicks I have to make, but also makes it perfectly clear what the goal of this campaign is and how I can reach it.

Amazon is no stranger to this concept, either. When you purchase a book on your Kindle, Amazon will generally send you an email a little like this:

…however, they also test a variation that looks like this:

As you can see, they are clearly breaking up the call-to-action into a series of “deep links” — links that take the customer further down the funnel. When you click “Rate this book” in the first email, you are taken to a page where you select the rating (out of five) and, optionally, leave a comment.

In the latter email, a click and a step are removed so you have to do less. This is a fine example of the KISS principle at work: keep it simple, stupid. By making it extremely clear what you’re getting yourself into when engaging with this email, Amazon nails the split CTA.

A final example of splitting out the primary CTA into deeper links comes from Badoo with their social “rate another profile” update emails:

So, next time you’re setting up an A/B test, ask yourself: are you able to break out your CTA into more detailed links? Can you help your customers “skip a step”? If so, test this for an extra boost in conversions.

2. Repeat Your CTA In Your Signature Or Postscript (P.S.)

Even if you can’t split out your CTA, you should certainly try repeating it!

Including too many links is overwhelming — but having just two or even three links pointing to the same ultimate goal generally leads to a lift in conversions rather than a drop-off.

This message from KISSmetrics is a classic example of a long-form email that ultimately ends with a simple call-to-action — in this case, to join a webinar. You will note the repetition of the CTA in the postscript. A postscript (or P.S.) is a magical device, as readers are visually drawn to them, even when skimming through an email. If you want to drive a point home, repeating it in the P.S. really helps.

You can see that repeating the call-to-action isn’t too difficult. The most common ways to frame the call-to-action in the P.S. are:

Offering a discount or bonus. E.g., Remember, the first 10 people to click through get an extra 10% off!

Adding a personal touch. E.g., I can’t wait to see these five tips help transform your email conversions. Sign up and let’s talk.

Creating a sense of urgency. E.g., Don’t forget that this offer ends in 12 hours.

All of these can be effective, but one thing is for sure: you should test whether including a CTA a second time, as part of a postscript or footer, lifts your conversions.

3. Test The Variety & Order Of Your Secondary Links

Lots of campaigns, particularly those that use standard templates, contain a series of secondary links located in the header area. These are designed to give the customer options or to take them down different paths to the same goal (e.g., purchase).

Here’s an example from Net-a-Porter:

Here’s a second example from Amazon:

Aside from testing whether removing these links entirely increases conversions, you should definitely test the order and contents of these links.

In the Amazon example, there are a number of interesting links in the header, including a link to personal recommendations, a link to sign up for Amazon Prime, a link for free UK delivery, and a series of three links for “MP3,” “Deals of the Week,” and “See all departments.”

There is a lot going on there. What if you were to change the order of these links? Should men see the same links as women? Should people under 30 see the same as people over 30? Is including a link to Amazon Prime cannibalising the Prime conversions?

These sorts of tests are becoming easier and easier to build, as you can use advanced templating languages to include or exclude content based on various parameters. Even having two basic variations – one with links A, B and C, and another with links D, E and F — will tell you a great deal about what works!

This doesn’t just apply to complex templates. In this blog update email from KISSmetrics, there is a link to sign up in the footer.

They understood that customers are looking to be educated. By finding the most common customer support questions, Flightfox was able to pull together a campaign that truly answers customers’ questions and focuses on them.

Next time you send a campaign, run a simple A/B test on your subject line or body content that uses questions — you may be surprised by the results!

5. Go Mobile With Responsive Templates

As mobile devices take over the world, it is more important than ever to ensure you maximize your conversions for recipients reading their emails on mobile devices.

Up to 65% of emails email opens already occur on mobile devices. That’s a huge percentage — so you should definitely track what devices your customers are using. It is worth conducting an A/B test with a responsive template to see the impact.

Your Turn!

Here’s what you should do next:

Grab your next email marketing campaign (perhaps you’ve already got one in draft ready to go?) and set up an A/B test. Keep it simple and keep it small, if you’d like, but use one of the tips above, and see how you do!

]]>http://marketingland.com/5-email-ab-split-test-ideas-you-havent-tried-49683/feed05 Ways To Put Your Email Call To Action To Workhttp://marketingland.com/5-examples-of-how-to-put-your-email-call-to-action-to-work-48677
http://marketingland.com/5-examples-of-how-to-put-your-email-call-to-action-to-work-48677#commentsWed, 19 Jun 2013 14:38:25 +0000http://marketingland.com/?p=48677Having an effective call to action in your email marketing — whether part of newsletters, transactional emails or lifecycle campaigns — is a must if you want to engage and convert your customers. One of the worst things you can do is “wing it” when it comes to creating a call to action, yet this […]

]]>Having an effective call to action in your email marketing — whether part of newsletters, transactional emails or lifecycle campaigns — is a must if you want to engage and convert your customers.

One of the worst things you can do is “wing it” when it comes to creating a call to action, yet this is all too common for online businesses.

Today, we will take a look at some great examples of email campaigns that really nail the call to action. Hopefully, they will provide inspiration for your campaigns across the board.

1. Images Can Cost You Sales

With up to 60% of all recipients regularly turning off images, it’s clear that relying on images in your email marketing campaigns is a risky move.

Images can be very useful, but it’s important to have a fallback — and there are lots of things you can do to maximise the look and feel of your campaign for times when images are enabled, along with the times when they are not enabled.

This is particularly true when it comes to your call to action. On a website, having a big orange button is a powerful way to attract your customers’ attention and get them to click. Although this works equally well in email marketing, incorporating a big button can be tricky, as using an image means many customers will never even see it!

However, there is a simple way to combat this: use HTML to create buttons instead! Most email marketing campaigns use images; but, with a few tweaks, you can stand out from the crowd.

Here are two great examples of campaigns using non-image-based buttons.

To go even further, a little trick you can do is to include some shadows or background images for the customers that view your email in their browser. By default, these styles won’t show up in email clients, but will give your buttons a little extra “pop” when viewed via browser. The GetResponse campaign above does this nicely. Below is a screenshot of the campaign when you view it directly in your browser:

If you’re after more tips on how to use HTML effectively in your email campaigns and need some resources to get you going, check out this guide to HTML templates in email marketing.

2. Focus On Value & Direction

All too often, you see emails that have calls to action with copy like “Submit” or “Click here.”

This is never the ideal approach when it comes to marketing optimisation — you should always focus on the next step, including the value the reader will get from taking this step. Rather than focusing on the actual action (i.e., clicking or submitting) you should be focusing on what follows.

This doesn’t mean you need to have a lengthy call to action; it just means things need to flow.

If you are invited to LinkedIn (and are not a LinkedIn member already), they’ll send you an email similar to this. It would be tempting to include a call to action that says “Sign up for LinkedIn” or “Build your profile now,” but both of these CTAs are quite self-centric (i.e., focused on LinkedIn and their own benefits).

In contrast, having the personalised copy — “Confirm that you know [insert friend's name]” — is truly powerful. In most cases, the invitee does know the person who has invited them to LinkedIn, and clicking this button is a rather innocuous next step.

Another, simpler example is this campaign from LinkedIn:

In this instance, the simple “Continue” works well — it makes it sound as though you need to click through and do something in order to recognise the endorsement (the truth is, you’ve already been endorsed). Although the copy isn’t that exciting, it is a great example of focusing on the next step and the value for the recipient in order to create a CTA that converts.

3. Repeat Your CTA

Repeating your primary call to action is a simple and effective way to increase click-throughs. Generally, the primary focus of your email marketing campaigns is to get more customers, and reiterating your CTA is a tactic used by some of the world’s biggest brands to ensure their customers convert. It might seem pretty “base,” but it really does work!

This can be as simple as including links on multiple images, titles and anchor text; or, it can be a little more deliberate.

A common way of repeating the call to action is to use a postscript (the “P.S.”). For some reason, readers are predisposed to read the postscript every time. Perhaps a throw-back to the days of letter-writing, the effectiveness of the postscript is truly there and you should embrace it.

This example from Lars at KISSmetrics is a good one, as Lars reiterates the call to action in the postscript, below his signature.

Even when you’re not explicitly asking customers to click through, this tactic can work. In the following campaign, the team at Tout encourages customers to call them up directly by reiterating that’s what they’re after in the postscript:

Adding a postscript is easy. Consider adding one to your campaigns today, and start by being personal and reiterating your call to action. Measure the increase — I guarantee customers will read this postscript and you should see a lift in click-throughs!

4. Use Urgency

Psychology is behind every human action. This should never be forgotten when optimising your email campaigns.

Urgency is a powerful psychological motivator. As Greg Ciotti points out in his excellent article on customer psychology, when used correctly, urgency can make customers take the next step.

Generally, urgency in emails comes down to timing and tying a deadline to your call to action. Greg explains that the trick is to very clearly outline the steps your customers have to take and hit them with a specific call to action whilst applying a little pressure via a timeframe.

This example comes from Dunked. When you reserved your name as part of the beta, you received a few emails over a six month period. This campaign ultimately followed up to ensure customers re-engaged with Dunked and signed up properly. Using time pressure, the campaign is effective in driving customers toward the desired goal:

Urgency can also be used in more subtle ways. When you book a flight with EasyJet, they send you a series of emails leading up to your departure advertising specials on accommodations. This is implied urgency, as you know you are leaving shortly on your trip and thus have a limited time to book a hotel. Another subtle example of urgency working wonders!

5. Test Unique Formats

Generally, it’s best to have a single call to action. This goes with the old saying, “Keep it simple, stupid.” You don’t want to make your customers think too much — you want to make their choice obvious.

However, there are times when testing multiple calls to action, or unique formats, can be really powerful.

Their goal is to get the maximum number of customers contributing feedback. The simple tweak of breaking the primary call to action down into multiple buttons actually makes customers’ lives easier by saving them time. Rather than take them to a webpage where they have to fill out a form and click “Next” (the norm), this approach reduces the number of clicks your customers have to take by at least two.

This reminds me of a saying I heard recently: “You should work to reduce the clicks to wow.” The fewer clicks your customers have to take to get to where they need to be, the more customers you’ll convert.

CrazyEgg isn’t the only one crazy enough to try it. Amazon does something similar in their book recommendation emails (triggered when you purchase a book on your Kindle):

Another great example of making customers’ lives easier with a little thinking outside the box.

Your Turn

What calls to action have worked well for your business? What ideas here can you implement in your own campaigns?

]]>http://marketingland.com/5-examples-of-how-to-put-your-email-call-to-action-to-work-48677/feed1Auto-Responders: Why Trigger-Based Email Will Increase Your Conversionshttp://marketingland.com/auto-responders-why-trigger-based-email-will-increase-your-conversions-43839
http://marketingland.com/auto-responders-why-trigger-based-email-will-increase-your-conversions-43839#commentsWed, 22 May 2013 13:38:08 +0000http://marketingland.com/?p=43839Internet marketing research firm MarketingSherpa recently asked online businesses what types of automated emails they send. The results (full chart here) show that outside of welcome, thank you and transactional emails (such as receipts), most business are not fully embracing the power of auto-responders. In fact, based on their data, about 75% of businesses are […]

The results (full chart here) show that outside of welcome, thank you and transactional emails (such as receipts), most business are not fully embracing the power of auto-responders.

In fact, based on their data, about 75% of businesses are missing out on the email marketing sweet spot.

Why Use Auto-Responders?

What’s the sweet spot, you might ask?

Per the diagram above, newsletters (i.e., one email distributed to many people) have an open rate of around 20%.

In contrast, transactional emails have an average open rate of around 50%. Simply put, this means that trigger-based transactional emails are over 100% more effective than newsletters on average!

The fact is that emails sent based on customer actions get more opens, clicks and conversions because they are contextual.

Auto-responders are in this sweet spot: they deliver marketing messages just like newsletters but use automated triggers, providing the user with context.

So, if you want to get started with your own trigger-based marketing campaigns and be part of the 25% that send the most effective email campaigns, here are some tips on how you can get started — along with some real-world examples so you can see these tactics in action.

1. Segment Your Customers Based On Their Behavior

Sending personalized offers to customers based on their on-site behavior is an incredibly effective email marketing tactic. For an example, let’s look at Amazon, the world’s largest (and arguably most efficient) online retailer.

Chris Schwarz over at The Search Guys talks about an experience he had where he browsed a series of point-and-shoot digital cameras and received a series of automated follow-up emails from Amazon, all directly referencing products he had browsed.

Here are just two examples:

Not only are these emails extremely targeted, they also use various psychology techniques to encourage customers to click through and, ultimately, purchase. The A-Z sweepstakes is a particularly sneaky example of automated email marketing in action!

The key takeaway from these emails is to use customers’ actions to drive segmentation. Rather than asking customers, “What do you want to buy today?” (which is difficult to do), Amazon infers their customers’ intent is based on their browsing habits.

2. Use Social Triggers To Drive Engagement

Take this email from Twitter. Many of you may recognize this campaign from your own inboxes:

Twitter understands that engagement with their service requires users to “follow” and be “followed” a certain number of times, i.e., they must interact with a certain number of other customers. To help drive customers toward activation, Twitter uses trigger-based emails like these to suggest relevant profiles for its users to follow.

LinkedIn has recently rolled out their “endorsements” feature. This feature allows you to ‘endorse’ a colleague or friend for a particular skill, such as “e-commerce.” Email marketing has been a big part of the roll-out of this feature. For example, you may have received these emails in your inbox of late:

An email like this is sent whenever a user endorses you for a new skill. These emails are great for two reasons:

They make you feel special (you’ve just been told you’re awesome at a certain skill!)

They encourage you to click through and endorse another user.

Both of these are great outcomes for LinkedIn as they strengthen the community and your investment in the LinkedIn platform. Rather than just telling you, “Hey! You’ve been endorsed,” adding the call to action turns this trigger-based email into a marketing channel to drive an engagement loop that is really powerful.

OkCupid is an online dating app that is particularly data-driven. They’re very savvy email marketers, too. Take this email as an example:

Whenever a new profile matches a certain percentage hit-rate with your own profile, they’ll automatically send you an email like this. Similarly they automatically email customers when new profiles are added that meet your search conditions.

3. Educating New Leads

WPEngine is a WordPress host that offers managed hosting. Despite charging a premium, they’re growing quickly in a market that is generally dominated by price-sensitive customers.

Their email marketing course is an effective lead-generation engine that provides customers with something of value, educates them with a series of automated emails and converts them into trial signups.

WPEngine automates 7 emails over 30 days that give away virtually everything they know about optimizing WordPress sites. This might sound counter-intuitive to making a sale, but by giving away their secrets, WPEngine shows potential customers just how hard it is to optimize a WordPress site. This quickly shows that it’s a no-brainer for you to spend $29 per month on their managed hosting.

A course like this is a tried-and-true method of turning new leads into customers and is a great application of a trigger-based email marketing campaign. Get customers interested with something of value, give them lots of fantastic content sent directly to their inbox and earn a customer for life.

HitTail employs a similar methodology and even goes as far as capturing leads on their homepage. This is a great move, as it gives customers who are not yet ready to start a free trial an alternate option.

4. Automate Yourself Out Of The Equation

Some of the best auto-responders are simply campaigns that are designed to imitate the real-life follow-up emails you, or a member of your team, already send.

HelloFax is a SaaS company that makes it easy to send faxes online. They send out this welcome email from one of their founders, Joseph, to all new signups:

Joseph isn’t actually typing out all of these emails, but the simplicity of the emails certainly lends itself to this impression.

This sort of email always impresses customers and leads to a high response rate with priceless customer feedback. In this example, writing back actually directs your response to HelloFax’s help desk.

This is just one in a series of welcome (or activation) emails sent by HelloFax and is a great example of a campaign that is simple and to the point.

Great… So Where Can YOU Start?

It’s all very well to look at these examples and be impressed, but you might wonder how you can put together some auto-responders that will provide quick wins for your own business.

There are two really well-defined steps you should follow to get started with your first auto-responder campaign. By following these steps, I guarantee you’ll find at least one campaign that will give you a 10 times ROI on your email marketing spend!

1. Find Your Key Trigger

What should you use to actually trigger your auto-responder campaign? The place to start is to focus on your quickest win.

An e-commerce store might review the steps from landing on their homepage, viewing a product, adding a product to the cart, beginning checkout and, finally, to completing checkout.

A software as a service application might review the steps from free trial signup to taking a core action within the application to becoming a paying customer.

When reviewing your funnel, you want to find the step at which you have the highest drop-off. That’s where you’ll find the trigger to provide you with the quickest win.

Flightfox provides a great example of this. They’re a travel search company with a five-step process. Most importantly, step one is providing your itinerary details and step two is providing your credit card details.

They identified a key drop-off between steps one and two and decided to focus on decreasing the drop-off rate with an auto-responder.

Using Vero, they set up an email that goes out 24 hours after a customer completes step one but doesn’t complete step two.

This email lifted their overall funnel conversions by 20%!

The key takeaway here is to find the place you can get the quickest win and implement an email remarketing campaign targeting that particular point in your funnel.

Disclosure: Flightfox is a customer of my company, Vero. You can read the full case study on how they used email remarketing to increase their email conversions.

2. Keep It Simple!

Once you’ve found your key drop-off point, the next question is what to write in your initial auto-responder.

It can be tricky to get started — and often, worrying about the perfect copy, the perfect call-to-action or the perfect formatting can prevent marketers from getting started.

A fool-proof formula for coming up with the copy for your first auto-responder is to put yourself in your customers’ shoes: what are they thinking at this drop-off point? What questions do they usually ask you or your support team at this stage of their life-cycle?

Search your email or your help desk and you’ll quickly be able to come up with some idea of what these questions should be. Pick the top three most frequently asked questions and write out a simple email (no fancy HTML template) that addresses each question one after the other.

Here’s the email Flightfox put together:

Although extremely simple, this email is the perfect example of where to start. It does two things really well:

It answers customers’ questions directly. It is a useful email.

It has a clear call-to-action.

This format works equally well for customer activation, cart abandonment, engagement and any other automated campaign you intend to set up! If you do these two things well, you’ll nail your first automated campaign.

Auto-Over-And-Out

Now, it’s over to you! What sorts of trigger-based auto-responders are you going to set up first? Let me know in the comments or send me an email if you want to discuss tactics!

Next month, we’re going to look at some examples of great email copy and calls to action… so stay tuned.